Restlessness is deeply rooted in American mythology. We are a country of pilgrims, engaged in a lifelong search for what Ralph Waldo Emerson called an “original relation to the universe”—a unique understanding of the world that doesn’t rely on the traditions or teachings of past generations. Those who internalize this expectation will walk, trek, and seek—anything to shed an inherited skin and find an undiscovered self they can inhabit. If only skin, inherited or not, were so easy to shed. As Emerson wrote, “My giant goes with me wherever I go.”
Few have embodied this supposedly American quality with more complexity than the writer Peter Matthiessen. And few have captured it with more clarity than Lance Richardson in his new biography of Matthiessen, True Nature. Richardson portrays the peripatetic life of Matthiessen—a celebrated author, magazine editor, and undercover agent who died in 2014—not as an eclectic series of adventures but as a single, 86-year spiritual quest. As he writes, Matthiessen’s “inner journey determined the choices he made throughout his long life; it is the string on which the various beads of his career were strung.” Matthiessen fled his monied upbringing in a flawed yet fascinating attempt to escape the person the world expected him to be.
The central project of Matthiessen’s existence was a relentless, often painful attempt to locate what, quoting Zen Buddhists, he called a “true nature”—an authentic core beneath the layers of identity that he had received or constructed. His life story provides a warning for today’s perpetually dissatisfied strivers: mainly members of the tech or business elite who have made a name for themselves, only to still feel empty and insecure. Many use their considerable resources to set out for other territories in search of something they’re unlikely to find.
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Like many pilgrimages, Matthiessen’s journey began with a foundational trauma. Born in 1927, he had a storybook childhood on New York’s Fishers Island that was ruptured one summer by an incident on his father’s boat. The young Matthiessen had been learning to swim, so his father took him out to the harbor and threw him overboard to see if the lessons had stuck. As Richardson writes, Matthiessen made the mistake of clinging to his father’s shirt as he was thrown and nearly broke his arm on the side of the boat. He would later call this humiliation “the opening skirmish in an absolutely pointless lifelong war” with his family, and his adulthood was a series of escapes from that original wound. He fled to Paris, the classic expatriate move, but did so under bizarre circumstances—co-founding The Paris Review while serving as an agent for the CIA. Thoreau went to Walden Pond to flee a society he saw as corrupt; Matthiessen, for his part, went to the center of the establishment’s undercover operations to fund and facilitate his own existential escape.
The only writer to ever win National Book Awards for both fiction and nonfiction, Matthiessen was an architect of the postwar intellectual world, a contemporary of giants such as Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, and William Styron. His peers often waged their philosophical battles in the public squares of New York and Washington, but Matthiessen grew wary of the ego and performance required of the literary lion. Instead he traveled to the mountains of Nepal in search of snow leopards, and deep into China and Mongolia to catch a glimpse of the rarest cranes on Earth. But what he was really searching for was far more personal.
Matthiessen’s pursuits weren’t solely internal; his work was also a very public counterpoint to the materialism and social conformity that he believed defined the second half of 20th-century America. His seminal book, Wildlife in America, published in 1959, was a meticulously researched history of the natural world and the devastating effects of human activity. Richardson rightly calls it “a landmark in nature writing,” which predated Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Matthiessen’s search for a preindustrial Eden also drives The Snow Leopard, his best-known work. On its surface, the book is the account of his two-month trek into Nepal’s Himalayas with the naturalist George Schaller, in 1973. But it is also a record of what Matthiessen called “a true pilgrimage, a journey of the heart” as he grieved the recent death of his wife. The hunt for the elusive, almost mythical snow leopard becomes a metaphor for the search for spiritual enlightenment, a release from the travails and humiliations of everyday human life.
I first read The Snow Leopard when I was 20. It filled me with the misguided but tantalizing belief that a life of meaning was to be found elsewhere. It inspired my own pilgrimage to the Alps, retracing the trails that Friedrich Nietzsche hiked while writing his greatest work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra; I sought the kind of authenticity that seemed impossible to find in a comfortable American suburb. The journey was enabled by a scholarship to a good school—a form of privilege that was almost entirely lost on me. Matthiessen’s profound and lonely meditations at 17,000 feet were, similarly, made possible by National Geographic funding, a name that opened doors, the very worldly security he was trying to transcend.
Perhaps he understood, on some level, the irony. Richardson writes that in the Amazon, many years before his subject traveled to Nepal, Matthiessen had encountered a genuine wanderer, a French Canadian drifter named Johnny Gauvin, and felt a sudden, uncomfortable self-awareness. Displacement and its attendant poverty were Gauvin’s way of life. Matthiessen realized that he was no authentic man of the wilderness, but an affluent visitor. “It’s a disturbing quality, and one that induces a certain self-consciousness about one’s eyeglasses, say, or the gleam of one’s new khaki pants,” he wrote in The New Yorker in 1961. Pilgrimages sometimes cause collateral damage too. In later life, he admitted that it may have been a mistake to leave his 8-year-old son so soon after the death of his wife to embark on the Himalayan expedition.
Matthiessen’s example provides a powerful archetype for the modern day. The tech billionaire who flies to space seeking the “overview effect” is in search of something beyond the ken of the material world, which he has already conquered. The annual ritual of Burning Man sees wealthy people enact a temporary shedding of their consumerist skin, even if getting there requires enlarging one’s carbon footprint. The Silicon Valley executive who flies to Peru for an ayahuasca retreat is on a journey Matthiessen would have recognized intimately. Long before embarking on his formal Zen training, Matthiessen was an early psychonaut, experimenting with LSD in the 1960s. In search of mind-altering effects, he sought a chemical shortcut to the dissolution of the ego, a forced glimpse of the “true nature” that his privilege and ambition otherwise obscured. Matthiessen’s path from psychedelics to the rigorous discipline of Zen meditation shows what a genuine spiritual journey looks like: It is extremely difficult, deeply private, and never-ending. There is no shortcut.
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Did Matthiessen ever find what he was looking for? Richardson’s elegant and rigorous biography wisely leaves the question open. But what it does make clear is that “true nature” is not a stable or permanent destination. It is a process, an experience, a temporary vision, an opening caused by a sudden confrontation with the world beyond us. Later in life, as Richardson writes, Matthiessen compared it to a tiger jumping into a quiet room. Reflecting on his tiger moment—a vision of his dying wife experienced in a sesshin, an intense form of Buddhist meditation—Matthiessen noted that “for the first time since unremembered childhood, I was not alone, there was no separate ‘I.’ Wounds, anger, ragged edges, hollow places were all gone, all had been healed; my heart was the heart of all creation.” But this beautiful instant is, by definition, temporary.
Matthiessen, ultimately, refused to fit into any tidy box. He was an environmental activist who hobnobbed with the jet set, a devoted Buddhist who wrestled with a titanic ego, a man who knew that all things ultimately return to nature but fought against death to the very end. Matthiessen embodied many ironies, but one might feel particularly evergreen: The conditions that make possible a search for existential fulfillment are often what make it so very difficult to find.
